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292 the Motherline with Jungian Analyst Naomi Ruth Lowinsky Transcribed from www.ShrinkRapRadio.com Shrink Rap Radio #292, January 19th, 2012 “The Motherline” Dr. David Van Nuys Ph.D., aka ‘Dr. Dave’ interviews Naomi Ruth Lowinsky PhD (Transcribed from http://www.shrinkrapradio.com by Gloria Oelman) Introduction: My guest today is Jungian analyst Dr Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and we’ll be discussing her book The Motherline, which is about the journey to discover the roots of the feminine psyche. It should be of interest not only to our female listeners but also to those men who wish to understand them. To learn more about Dr. Lowinsky, please consult our show notes at www.shrinkrapradio.com Now here’s the interview. Dr. Dave: Dr. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky welcome to Shrink Rap Radio. Naomi Lowinsky: Thank you. Dr. Dave: Well it’s good to have you on the show. I recently interviewed your friend and fellow analyst Pat Damery about her book Farming Soul and I know you two are collaborators. You’re working on other things together, right? Naomi Lowinsky: We are, yes. Dr. Dave: So let’s talk about your book The Motherline. So first of all, what do you mean by the term ‘Motherline?’ Naomi Lowinsky: I understand the Motherline to be the interconnection between generations of women and for men it’s their relationship to their connection to the birth process. All life begins in a woman’s body and I was struggling with this notion that lineage tended – at least in the time that I was working on this book, which was a while ago – to be seen totally in male terms. And I thought ‘hey, wait a minute, there’s something missing here.’ So for me the image of the Motherline is kind of like umbilical cords that tie us back to our great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great grandmothers and forward to generations to come. So a woman who has children will often think about her children in terms of her own memories of being a child and I call that looping. That’s another form of the Motherline and women who don’t have children, or men, relate to the women who gave them birth. Dr. Dave: There was a portion in your book where you were talking about this and it reminded me of something my wife had shared with me some years back, before we had children I think and it was a kind of vision in which she saw these pelvic arches, if you will, extending way into the past and way into the future. Naomi Lowinsky: Oh, that’s beautiful! Shrink Rap Radio #292 The Motherline with Naomi Ruth Lowinsky PhD Page 1 of 15 Transcribed from www.ShrinkRapRadio.com Dr. Dave: Yeah and she realized that she was in this flow both from the past and from the children that would come and since then we’ve had four children and at least one of them has had children. Now you yourself are a daughter and a granddaughter and a mother and maybe a grandmother too, or not? Naomi Lowinsky: Oh, yes, a grandmother as well, yes. I wasn’t at the time I wrote the book, which was twenty years ago but now I’m a grandma. Dr. Dave: The book you wrote twenty years ago? Naomi Lowinsky: I did, yes. It’s been reissued by Fisher King Press but Putnam originally published it in 1992. Dr. Dave: Well, I had no idea. As I ask you questions about the book I hope you can remember. Maybe some of your ideas will have changed because I just looked at the copyright date and it was 2010. If I’d read the fine print further down on the page, maybe I would have seen something indicating that it was older than that. Naomi Lowinsky: Yeah. Well it’s my first publication and women still come and tell me how much it means to them and are buying it currently which makes me really happy and I was very delighted when Fisher King Press decided to reissue it. Dr. Dave: Well, this has particular relevance to the next question that I had here, which was: ‘in your forward you say you’ve been working on this book all your life and so, how so?’ was the question. Tell us about what you meant when you said that twenty years ago. Maybe the forward was for this edition? Naomi Lowinsky: No, actually I think I said that at the time that I originally published it because I became a mother very young and I married young and had children very young and as I developed and had some Jungian analysis and began to reflect on myself, I came to understand that I needed to have babies young because my people were German and Russian Jews who had to flee from Hitler and so many were lost in the show up, in the Holocaust, that at an unconscious level I just needed to repopulate the earth. Of course obviously I wasn’t going to do that single handedly but it was that there was this enormous inner pressure to have children. Dr. Dave: How old were you, you say you were very young, how old were you? Naomi Lowinsky: Well I was married at 18 and had my first child at 19. That’s pretty young, huh? Dr. Dave: Yeah, by middle class US standards, that’s true. Naomi Lowinsky: Right, that’s true. So giving birth was such a powerful experience and it’s an archetypal experience of course and one of the great things, at least for me, about having a baby young was that it was pretty easy to give birth. So I was able to really, really enjoy the experience and I didn’t have to use any drugs. I felt like I was transformed by that experience and I kept feeling I needed to be able to write about it but I had kids to take care of and dishes to do and meals to prepare and a husband going to medical school. So it really wasn’t a good time but I kept thinking about it Shrink Rap Radio #292 The Motherline with Naomi Ruth Lowinsky PhD Page 2 of 15 Transcribed from www.ShrinkRapRadio.com and I kept making little stabs at it and then as I got older and my kids got older, I started getting really angry that I could not put being a mother on a resumé and so I began plotting how I could put this on a resumé. So when I decided to go get my master’s degree in psychology because I wanted to work as a therapist, I did a dissertation about three generations of women and how ideas about contraception had changed. Then when I decided, after I’d been in practice for a while, that I wanted a doctorate I did a dissertation again about women and interviewed women about their experiences and that’s where the Motherline idea really came into focus for me. When a woman whom I interviewed began talking about her daughter’s first menstruation and how moved she was by it and – kind of like your wife’s image – she suddenly started describing this as being the bridge between generations, where she could see herself and all the women before her and then all the women from her daughter on, going on into the future, in this moment of seeing the blood on her daughter’s underpants. It was so moving and I began thinking about that in terms of Jung’s beautiful essay on the Eleusinian mysteries where he talks about the interconnection between generations of women as having this kind of healthy aspect for women where they know who they belong to and they know where they’re going. And that was at a time when women’s lives were pretty circular and I don’t know if women were happy with it or not, I don’t go back that far but there was that sense of becoming your mother and through giving birth and having a daughter, remembering your younger self. That is something that I think is enormously valuable that had, certainly at the time that I was working on the book, with the feminist movement which was extremely important for my development but there was this kind of rejection of the feminine, in the Jungian sense of the feminine, by a lot of feminists. Dr. Dave: Yes, I want to pick up on both of those things that you just mentioned but first I wanted to ask you, early on you write and I’m going to quote: ‘we’re so full of judgments about what mother ought to be, that we can barely see what mother is.’ So tell us about that. Naomi Lowinsky: Well, you and I are in a profession that tends to objectify mothers. In fact, mothers are the essential objects – object relations is all about the relationship to the mother and so much is understood about our psychological development in terms of our relationship to our mothers at a very young age and of course I think that’s profoundly true and very, very important but there’s been a kind of bias which identifies with the child’s point of view and doesn’t see the mother’s point of view that has left mothers out of the equation. And so to think about the mother and her experience and her reality is part of the psychological picture that I think it’s a great loss if we don’t include that and it’s a great loss to women who are mothers because we can’t basically identify with ourselves because we keep thinking – in my practice I'm constantly hearing this from women – ‘Oh, my God, I'm ruining my child, I did this, I did that…’ There’s this hyperconsciousness and self-criticality about being a human being who has limitations and has a temper sometimes and has needs.
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